COVID-19 has reset “normal” at your business. For the last six to seven weeks, you have been forced to reimagine how you do business and deliver customer satisfaction. You’ve had to focus on both team and financial health.
“You’ve made many of the toughest decisions in your entire business career, maybe in your entire life. Maybe you had to let employees go,” says Mel Kleinman, president of Humetrics, a human resource consulting firm.
Now, you must answer an extremely important decision before you reopen: Who do you bring back?
“When it comes to your employees, bring back only the best—period,” Kleinman says. “You’ll need to run lean and mean, so each and every one of them must be an A-player you can count on to do their job with excellence while following the systems and procedures that make protecting public health their A#1 priority.”
Why is this so important? Because that’s what it’s going to take to make your customers trust you enough to return, he says.
As you assess how you and your team spend time, look for ways to improve your processes.
“When it comes to the tasks that need to be done, now’s the time to find better, faster and cleaner ways to do them and to consider if they even need to be done in the first place,” Kleinman says. “Now is the perfect time to streamline systems and redefine responsibilities.”
Whatever “normal” looks like in the future, your business will need to adapt.
“Let’s face it, when it comes to cleanliness, public health, and customer service, ‘good’ will no longer be good enough,” Kleinman says. “To have any hope of winning back your customers’ confidence, ‘business as usual’ will mean your people, your products, your services, and your location will need to be cleaner and safer in every obvious way possible.”
As you start to think about what your business will look like going forward, Kleinman says, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to push the reset button and come back better and stronger than ever.
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